Saturday, January 16, 2010

My previous post had the silk and cotton floss test, which was okay, but here are the cotton perle tests.

This is size 5 - too large and clumsy.This is cotton perle 8, which is okay but it was hard to do the points on this cornflower. However, the faux gold from Thistle Threads is great.The petals and strawberry are Soie Perlee - really lovely. I love the gold on the strawberry - you will see that combo on the coif for sure. The rose center is spiral trellis in the silk. While I found the regular trellis too hard to use as a fill, the spiral trellis seems easier and looks nice as a center. There a several different motifs with round centers or bases so it may be that the flower centers are French knots or some other round stitch - we'll see.I didn't have any green Soie Perlee - at the time - so I used some of Catherine Jordan's overdyed cotton floss for the leaf. I actually like the effect and I can see using it for a project where you want a slightly mottled old look - it works up nicely.

I now have a lovely selection of Soie Perlee from Hedgehog Handworks. I talked with a very helpful woman on the phone who helped with getting shadings right since I couldn't find a good online colour chart. I will test the amounts now and order the threads for the project soon - since Hedgehog Handworks is having a sale until the end of the month! Isn't all this colour enough to make you want to get off the computer and stitch! So that is where I'm going...